Joel Connelly: Walt Crowley remembered

Ex-Gov. Mike Lowry took his seat at Walt Crowley’s memorial service Tuesday, and recalled when the author-historian served as gubernatorial speechwriter and drafted Lowry’s state-of-the-state speeches.

“If I had stuck to the texts he prepared, I would have gotten into a lot less controversy than with what I actually said,” joked Lowry, a Democrat.

Across the auditorium at the Museum of History and Industry, former Republican Gov. Dan Evans and wife Nancy were looking for a seat.

Crowley, 60, died on September 21st after a two-year fight with laryngeal cancer.

He left a bevy of indstructions, from the spare design of yesterday’s memorial observance to plans for the future of the historylink.org Web site that he helped found and nurtured to prominence.

Both Lowry and Evans paid private tribute to the productiveness and practicality of Crowley, who started to make his mark in Seattle 40 years ago as an editor of the underground newspaper “The Helix.”

The underground editor and artist went on to write an official history of The Rainier Club, and “The Fairmont: The First Century of a San Francisco Landmark.”

The avowed freethinker coauthored (with wife Marie McCaffrey) a remarkably honest official history, Seattle University: A Century of Jesuit Education.

Another book, “Moving Washington (with Kit Oldham) depicted the history of the state Department of Transportation, complete with the highwaymens’ discredited dream of a 10-lane freeway plowing through Seattle’s Mt. Baker neighborhood.

“He believed the past can help us make better decisions about the future: That was the essence of Walt,” McCaffrey told the packed auditorium, celebrating the life of the man who was her husband, partner and collaborator for 33 years.

Seattle attorney Henry Aronson, part of a dinner group that included Crowley and McCaffrey, defined his friend as “a fierce individualist with a passion for justice and a faith in rationalism.”

Ex-Mayor Norm Rice, another speaker, added: “To make a difference was Walt’s dream, his and mine.”

The celebration yesterday was of a spirited life, but also of a Seattle in which passionate debate was carried on with civility.

Crowley lost his larynx to cancer on Feb. 5. The night before his operation, Crowley and McCaffrey packed their home near Woodland Park with friends. Crowley rejoined his dinner group soon after the operation, “speaking” with a tablet and a noisemaker that McCaffrey called “the talking dildo.”

When he had his voice, Crowley verbally sparred for seven years on KIRO-TV with conservative pundit John Carlson.

A TV screen at MOHAI rebroadcast debates on the Reagan-era Star Wars program, the meanings of American liberty . . . and a self-parody in which the two pundits took a 5-year-old Christmas shopping for war and peace toys, evolution and creationism games.

The two delighted in each other’s company. Not once between 1986 and 1993 did Crowley attack Carlson at a human level, or vice versa.

The crowd yesterday was bipartisan: Crowley was a college dropout, but the master of ceremonies at his memorial was Dr. Hubert Locke, retired dean of the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. Another UW public affairs dean, Brewster Denny, was in the audience.

Ex-aides to Lowry and the late GOP Rep. Joel Pritchard caught up on their lives. Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis told Crowley stories. Seattle City Council members were on hand, along with denizens of Crowley’s beloved Blue Moon Tavern.

Crowley once helped save the ‘Moon from redevelopment, a cause that withstood stuffy hostile punditry on the Seattle Times editorial page. Typically, he treated Fairview Fannie’s ed page editor to a brewsky on the premises in a bid to change her hind.